Heather Kilbourn

Tech

My current tech career focus is Program Management, helping organizations scale out new or fix broken operational systems that span functional groups. My breadth & depth of skills & experience give me the ability step in anywhere and quickly be effective.

From today's cutting edges of AI and quantum computing to the past's Internet and PC revolutions, I've worked up, down, and across the technology stack in the areas of software, networking, and hardware at startup and global-scale companies.

And I have skills and experience beyond technology practice.

I founded, raised funds for, and sold a successful tech startup, I've spoken at conferences, taught, trained, and documented, worked in and know the rhythms & cadences of sales, marketing, branding, design, and communications, responded to cybersecurity incidents, developed policy, and sweat the ethical implications of the powerful tools the industry has created.

If you're interested in retaining me to help your organization, please contact me on LinkedIn.

AI - early-mid 2020s-present

As large language model transformers, er..., transformed the AI field, I worked in Microsoft's Office of the CTO supporting internal AI startups with marketing and executive communications. These startups were small teams of AI engineers working on a variety of AI-driven technology solutions.

With my background in entrepreneurship and technology engineering, I helped them communicate their technical solutions and transform them into market-ready business decision maker and executive communication materials. There, I learned first-hand about synthetic data for training, training data sets and labeling, other nuances of how AI does what it does, and where the industry is headed long-term.

Microsoft has a robust speaker series, and I sat in on many confidential, internal AI engineering talks about ethics, performance tuning, and security.

Today, I'm supporting SAP Business AI marketing. One of my current projects is developing an Airtable solution to track and manage AI marketing materials generated by many functional groups. This will provide a holistic view of the materials to enable better general messaging alignment and coordinate launch and disclosure activites.

Quantum computing - mid 2020s

Richard Feynman proposed using properties of quantum physics for computing in the 1980s and there was a hot minute where I wanted to be a quantum chemist at university. Lucky for me, I worked for Azure Quantum at Microsoft where I supported executive and public communications about the program, which had two main focus areas: building topological qubit chips and AI-driven quantum calculations for chemistry.

I ghostwrote articles and scripts, and was lucky enough to chat with the quantum physicists working to build the topological qubits and quantum software and hear them explain this mind-bending technology. With my science and sales background, I led executive briefings about the program and technology with Microsoft's customers.

This field is moving fast, and I expect we'll see some amazing breakthroughs in the rest of the decade.

Mobile computing - late 2000s-early 2010s

In part of my journey at Microsoft, I was part of the large team of people that brought Windows Phone to the world. I was my team's representative to shiproom, where high-level readiness issues were addressed and blocked bugs were unblocked. I was in the room for the meeting to approve the final software payload for release. I learned and watched how software at scale was developed and the trade-offs inherent in design, features, and issue severity to address before release. Don't tell anyone I brought my iPhone 4 to the ship party to take photos with, ok?

The Internet - early 1990s-mid 2010s

TCP/IP networking (AS11739), SMTP servers and gateways, DNS, USENET discussion groups, and setting up one of the first thousand or so web severs in the world gave me the skills to found my own tech company: digital.forest. digital.forest provided data center server colocation and web hosting to thousands of companies from around the world.

Besides being top tier technical support, I led two angel funding rounds, recruited an executive team, and after an 18(!) year journey, the company was sold through acquisition.

After digital.forest, I spent a decade at Microsoft working on web properties for audiences up to tens of millions per month, where I gained skills in information architecture, CX and UX analysis, and technical and developer documentation publishing.

After Microsoft, I went to IMDb, where I was the product manager for the iOS and Android mobile apps and the core web experience. IMDb's traffic was in the hundreds of millions of visitors per month. Here, I learned and led Agile standups with development teams, prioritized and drove feature development, led a redesign of the Android app, and directed a SEO audit and fixes that helped reverse search-referred traffic drains. On my last day, one of the mobile developers gave me high praise by saying [paraphrased], "You're the first product manager that's actually gotten stuff done in years."

The PC revolution - 1980s-early 1990s

My school district went all-in with computers and bought many Apple IIe computers for science classes. I learned some BASIC and used computer-connected probes to collect experiment data.

My grandmother bought me my first computer, a MacSE 2/20; (two megabytes RAM, twenty megabytes disk.) I taught myself how to "program" Hypercard and smarter people than me taught me how to use ResEdit to tweak programs and system files, install RAM and hard drives, AppleTalk networking, and that the highest-margin items sold with a computer were the mouse pad and power strip.

College work-study desk side and phone technical support at the University of Washington medical complex taught me the ins and outs of operating systems and applications, and how to communicate with all sorts of people. (I still think about the one orthopedist who complained about having to memorize a password and wanted no password to access his computer. He could remember the 200+ names of bones in the human body but not a password? We compromised when I assigned him the password "bone". A garbage password, but at least it was something.) Local area network troubleshooting and build-out fit well with my systematizing brain and sensitized me to emergent system behavior.

Troubleshooting

For some unknown reason, from software bugs to hardware faults, and misconfigurations to user error and tangled processes, my troubleshooting and process visualization skills are a few standard deviations above average.

Career highlights include:

You should hire me!